How to (Scientifically) Pick the Best Domain Name

tl;dr

Using clever survey questions to quickly test the memorability, spellability and emotional response of potential domain names. Glad we did – almost picked a lousy one.

Problem: Domain Squatters

I’ve found what should be the joyous process of naming a company, quickly devolves into in argument over which of the abysmal choices of available domain names suck the least.

Some friends and I who were building a crowdfunding aggregator wanted to avoid all that, so we came up with a way to test our company/domain names with customer data. Here’s how…

Step 1: Crowdsource Ideas

SquadHelp is 99Designs for domain names. That means you pay a couple bucks and SquadHelp users will find you some 500+ domain names, all of which are currently available. And if you don’t like any of them, you don’t pay anything.

Note: 99% of the suggestions are going to bad, but I always find that are good ones are worth the money, and they provide inspiration to come up with my own names.

Looking over the list of possible names for our crowdfunding aggregator, we chose our top 3:

altFunder.com

ChangeFunding.com

ThingsWeStart.com

altFunder.com was our favorite name going in to the experiment, the next step of which was deciding…

Step 2: What to Measure?

After reading up on what makes for a good company name, we decided to measure the following characteristics of each name:

To test Associations:

For each of the associations (e.g. emotional, image, and competitor) we asked them simple questions like:

What images come to mind when you hear this time?

How do you feel when you hear this name?

What organizations come to mind when you hear this name?

Btw, we used nsurvey for this – an open source survey tool that gave us the power & flexibility we needed. With the survey designed, it was time to…

Step 4: Run the Experiment

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The site was B2C, so we decided to throw our survey up on Mechanical Turk. We paid $0.10 for each respondent and we stopped after we got 50 (all told $5).

mTurk naming survey HIT with bonus fraud detection

Fraud Detection: we had quality assurance questions built into the survey (e.g. what’s the 9th word in the second paragraph, what’s 16 + 32, etc.) to detect cheaters. We gave cheaters a different password than people who took the time to fill out the survey thoroughly.

Step 5: Evaluating the Results

Once the survey results were in, I threw them in a spreadsheet and scored each of the questions like so:

Hearability/Spellability: +2 points for a name each time it was spelled properly

Conclusion

We were wrong! We were leaning towards altFunder.com because it was short & edgy (and thus we assumed more memorable).

Turns out, ThingsWeStart.com was not only more memorable, it was also easier to hear/spell and it had much more positive associations.

For a couple bucks and a couple hours, we saved ourselves thousands of $’s by not picking the crappy name and having to change it later, or trying to buy one from a squatter.

Takeaway:

Don’t waste time debating product names…test them.

Tips & Tricks

– Before you post a survey about your domain names, be sure to purchase them all. Don’t want one of your clever respondents to snipe them from you.

– Most domain registrars offer a return policy. We bought all 3 domains we were testing, ran our test, and then got a refund for the 2 we didn’t use!

– Another great test would be to measure CTR on ads, or A/B test on a landing page. We didn’t have time for that, but I’d love to hear if you’ve run an experiment like that.

As always, comments and questions are appreciated!

If you liked this – consider sharing it so your friends don’t buy shitty domain names. You may also want to subscribe for new posts via Email or RSS. Our next article will be detailed explanation of Steve Blank & Startup Weekend’s Customer Development collaboration – SWNext – and how we think it fits into the greater startup ecosystem.

46 comments

Wow, this is a great approach to naming your website, and laying it out step by step is super helpful. I think the use of Mechanical Turk is a great idea, as it provides you with essentially on-demand survey results at such a low cost.

This is awesome! I wouldn’t have thought to check associations.
I’ve been wondering whether there are better names than Logical Increments for my thing. Now I know how to find out.
Thanks for sharing, Justin!

This is great! Please also consider looping in a trademark lawyer before the final decision, to help you evaluate whether the name you’ve selected is a good one legally as well. They can help you confirm whether it’s unlikely to conflict with someone already out there, and can function as a “strong” trademark. This is truly an ounce of prevention (a lawyer’s look-see) vs. a pound of cure (letters, lawsuit, and total re-brand) consideration!

Fair point, thanks for bringing it up Alina. That said, we can probably save ourselves a couple (hundred) bucks by using the online trademark search tool: http://1.usa.gov/YMHsyJ. If the name that users choose is one that conflicts w/ an existing trademark, perhaps then it’s time to get an official legal opinion.

Awesome post! Another resource to check possible trademark infringement: http://www.trademarkia.com/. I remember when we discussed whether Q… was a good name for the startup I was developing and you were right. It turns out it did horrible in the three categories of hear/spellability, memorability and associations.

2 other things we’re also using:
– “Pronounceability”: give Turkers a list of the potential names and have them call a Google Voice Mail and read the names. You can then go through all the recordings to see how people were pronouncing the names. In our case, some names were “made up” words and we expected to get different pronunciations, but we used that to see if some of these different pronunciations could results in spellability problems later down the road. So we took the Voice messages from Turkers (one male and one female) and used those for the spellability tests (which we ran in the same you you did).

– Mission Alignment: We describe the company mission and ask them which names better reflect that mission

+1 for Pedro. Once it becomes a branding exercise, there’s all kinds of of work to do. But those are great. Another question we sometimes ask is “Scanability” of a domain – basically whether your eyes can scan a name and actually comprehend the words that are being squished together.
Ex:
ThingsWeStart scans well
Thingsstevecandoonsundays does not (repetitive letters, etc.)

Case-sensitivity aside, it’s nice when a domain name seems to jump off a page when written in all lower caps.

Well done! It’s amazing how many people assume their own instincts on a name are always right. Yet, testing can be a daunting challenge. You made the test strong by measuring meaningful qualities, but you also made the test approachable/accessible. Doubt it would only take a couple hours (!) but great work. Wish more people did this in advance if picking their shitty company names.

Oh yeah! I remember that one. (I spoke last year as well.)
Also putting in a vote for “This would be a good product”! Think what people pay naming firms, how much time they spend checking for domains, etc. One service that knit all this together and helped test it… people would pay for that.

I loved this method so much I just tried it out for a B2B company I’m working with. Changes I made:
1) I didn’t put it on Mechanical Turk but rather posted it on LinkedIn and emailed my contacts who fit the proper profile
2) Instead of busy work like adding up numbers, etc, I asked a couple screens of demo-type questions. I thought the random busy work would just confuse and irritate my respondents, and since I wasn’t paying them I needed them to respond out of goodwill.

Hey Justin. Absolutely awesome idea! I’m coming to your blog quite often lately ;)
Can you tell me what tool you used to build the questionnaire? I tried surveymonkey, but couldn’t implement soundcloud-files (with the basic account).
What’s the best way to go here?

I’m not too sure what happened but it looks as though my post from last night is no longer there! Anyways, great article, it really has been a useful tool for me. Just one question, how did you create the last question in nsurvey which gave users who answered the CAPTCHA questions correctly, the correct code for MTurk?

Great question Ash! I actually had two different “Thank You” pages for the survey. One page with the correct code, the other an incorrect one. I then added some simple conditional logic to the survey that said, “If they answered correctly to the CAPTCHAs, send them to the good page. If they answered incorrectly, send them to the bad page.”

Justin the information is invaluable, thank you for the great post! I am embarking on a similar exercise based on this. I had a quick question, on mTurk did you use Project type “Survey” or “Other” to create the HIT? Also how many respondents did you get to consider it a relevant sample for statistical significance. Thanks in advance.